Urbanism
Environment
Design

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Nicholas Falk of the URBED Trust writes in the May edition of the Town & Country Planning magazine. Titled 'location, location location - funding investment in local infrastructure', Nick looks at how planning for housing and infrastructure can be linked together to get better value from public investment, by using multi-criteria analysis to assess strategic options and then by sharing the uplift in land values. 

The Housing White Paper aims to fix a ‘broken housing market’, and calls for combined authorities to produce spatial development strategies that will ‘join up’ housing and infrastructure and ‘allocate strategic sites’. There is no shortage of ideas for addressing the housing crisis – but where are the funds going to come from to double housing output and make available the necessary land; and how can we make planning more ‘proactive’ again when so many local authorities are dispirited and under-staffed? This article suggests how planning for housing and infrastructure can be linked together to get better value from public investment by using multi-criteria analysis to scope out and assess strategic options. It also proposes sharing the uplift in land values through the setting up of development corporations to promote complex schemes. This follows up earlier articles in Town & Country Planning lamenting the weak state of sub-regional planning in the UK and arguing that we need to ‘go to scale’ in building the housing that the UK desperately needs.

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